Friday, January 22, 2016

A blistering Trade Roundup

This was a bountiful week for me, with lots of cardboard coming in! Being tight on time and heavy on pending posts, I'm going to give a quick rundown of what came in, though these could each have a post dedicated to them.

This 2008 Stadium Club Clemente was atop my Desperate Double Dozen for a while. Great looking card, even if Topps cheated a bit by artificially coloring a black and white photo. I like how the current incarnation of Stadium Club isn't afraid to include a few b&w images.

A couple Bips and a Giancarlo.

Ooh, a quartet of Munnatawket custom minis that Chris' friend makes. These are always cool.

Thanks for the cards, Chris!

Let me quickly give a plug for the upcoming Nachos Grande 2016 Topps Series 1 group break. It's going to include a full case of jumbo boxes, plus Chris always throws in a bunch of bonus stuff to add to the fun. I jumped in and called dibs on the Cubs. I figured they have a lot of cards in the product (Topps is celebrating "100 Years of Wrigley" this year), plus I seem to have a lot of Cub collector trading buddies at the moment.. P-town Tom, Tony Burbs, CC, Nick-- I'll likely have you covered for team sets!). I should be able to restock the Cubs section of my tradebox, and hopefully land a sweet Kris Bryant or Ernie Banks for myself. Anyways, there are still many teams available so check out his post and consider signing up!

SCC is a fellow shiny card enthusiast, and was able to share eye-catching cards of Griffey, Verlander, and Darvish.

Not shiny, but still nice: A couple Donruss Padres. I'm bummed about Gyorko getting traded away this offseason and should type up a post about it someday.

Thank you for the cards, SCC!

- - - - -------

Marcus from all the way to the backstop dropped a stuffed medium-size flat-rate Priority Mail box on me. Ok, this one will need its own post! Looking forward to digging through everything.

- - - - -------
Next is the 2nd bunch of cards from Todd, the guy I got the Japanese cards assortment from just a couple weeks ago.

Cool cards of some big names here! Tanaka, Iguchi, Darvish.

And here's a nice lot of Japanese cards from 2000. I hadn't realized Tony Fernandez spent a year in Japan near the end of his career.

These cards are made by Hudson (easily identifiable by the cartoon bee) which I associate with one of my favorite old school Nintendo games, Milon's Secret Castle. I even made a little fansite for it back in 2002. I guess Hudson is a pretty big company in Japan.

Here's some more various baseball cards and a crazy lady wresting card for good measure.

Jumping from Japan now over to England, the real wow of the package has to be this lot of old British tobacco cards. Look for these to be featured in upcoming installments of Supervintage Sundays here on the blog.

Very cool! Thanks for the cards, Todd!

- - - - -------

Lastly for today, I've been reading The Raz Card Blog for a long time, but we've just finally swapped cards for the first time (well, I still need to send a return). Raz sent some good stuff.

Love this Mookie Betts purple refractor #'d /250.

Very happy to see this among the cards. I think it's my first Adam Jones relic.

Sgt. Slaughter is one of the few wrestling guys I collect, mainly because I remember him fondly from G.I. Joe in the 80s.

Now here's the main card Raz had set aside for me. He prefaced it by telling me not to get excited and it was basically a gag card to give me. I kept the image small because it shows kind of a disturbing picture of a blistered hand from an unidentified race car driver from 1971. Click to enlarge if you dare. The back talks about how back then, it was common for drivers to tear up their hands on the steering wheel. Kinda gross!

But the cool thing about this card..

Yep, a Christmas Card! A strange card indeed, but a welcome addition to my collection of cards serial numbered 12/25. It's always very rare and appreciated when I get one of these in a trade.

"Sponsors"

Do you ever buy stuff on Amazon? If so, please get there through this link to Amazon. If you do, I get a small percentage worth of store credit! Win-win!

Also, are you an employer? I would love to break into a career along the lines of this blog: writing, designing, marketing in a field of sportscards or sports in general. So if you're hiring for something cool like that, please get in touch! I currently live in Portland, OR and am not looking to relocate at this time, but I'd be great at working remotely.